Intractable: Life Inside Australia's First Super-Max Prison
Autobiography Memoir True Crime Criminology Australian Non-Fiction Prison Studies
Intractable: Life Inside Australia’s First Super-Max Prison is the gritty, first-hand account that true-crime readers and criminology students have been hunting for since Pan Macmillan released this 432-page paperback in 2006. Author Bernie Matthews isn’t an outside observer—he did his time inside the notorious Katingal facility, the country’s first “super-max,” and every paragraph carries the weight of lived experience. From the politics of extreme isolation to the ingenuity of long-term prisoners, the memoir delivers the kind of ethnographic detail no textbook can replicate, making it indispensable for anyone researching high-security incarceration or simply craving an authentic voice in Australian crime literature.
What sets this copy apart is condition and scarcity: the book is long out of print, yet this 233 mm tall edition remains clean, tight, and completely unmarked—no underlining, no cracked spine, no stuck pages. Only a handful of dog-eared corners betray its previous reader, so you can shelve it proudly or assign it to students without apology. At 654 g it feels substantial in the hands, and the ISBN 9781405037488 is already tracked by collectors, pushing prices upward on the secondary market.
Whether you’re building a university reading list, curating a true-crime collection, or searching for the perfect gift for a criminology buff, Intractable delivers an unfiltered window into Australia’s penal experiment that documentaries and academic articles only hint at. Secure this copy now—clean, collectible, and ready to ship—before the next price jump.
Refer to our eBay listing for a full condition report and many more high-quality pictures of this item.
Buy Now